The story:
While the SEC directed its staff for years to purge certain investigative records, other agencies in the United States and abroad that enforce financial laws have instructed that similar documents be kept.
Law enforcement authorities in related lines of work have preserved records of inquiries even if those probes never led to charges against anyone. Regulators and archivists said that the records could be a valuable source of information for investigators probing other cases and could help hold the authorities accountable.
The inspector general at the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating a long-running SEC policy that calls for purging records obtained in certain inquiries when the cases were closed. The probe was prompted by an internal whistleblower, who said the destruction of documents went on for 17 years.
The SEC has long been accused of having been captured by the financial sector. We discuss agency capture in both 2301 and 2302, along with the general topic of iron triangles and subgivernment. Current accusations concern whether the agency has purged files that might implicate it in criminal activity that might have occured that lead to the financial crisis in 2008.
- Wikipedia: The SEC.
